and what's beyond it

Hellos and goodbyes

May has always been a very busy month in the View Through the Window household.

There is my mother in law’s birthday, my brother’s birthday, Mother’s Day, my birthday, and then Memorial Day, when we usually go somewhere for vacation.

The month has gotten even busier since I started school again. It means the end of the semester. In fact, all my work for my classes is due before midnight on May 15.

I wasn’t going to let schoolwork get in the way of my enjoying my weekend, though, especially since I had extra reason to celebrate.

Reason number one is that my brother and his wife had their first baby last week. I am an aunt now for the second time!

And if that wasn’t awesome enough, my sister and her son, my four year old nephew, paid us a surprise visit all the way from Dallas, Texas.

There he is hiding behind his cousin, Son 1.

Seeing my nephews was the best gift ever. It made me so happy to be able to celebrate Mother’s Day with them.

We all went out to Chicago’s Chinatown on Sunday.

Chinatown has a little courtyard type of area, where there are statues of the animals of the Chinese zodiac. They have a little description underneath for who falls under which year and what animal.

Mine would be the Rat.

Here are some of the other ones.

We had a late lunch…

Lunch.

We were hungry.

Strawberry tapioca drink. Delicious.

and then toured some more.

Above are pictures of Chinatown’s candy store, where they lay out samples of stuff like dried plums, sesame seed candy, and sweet ginger. They have the regular stuff like Airheads and Skittles as well. I even saw some small samples of dried squid and cuttlefish.

I spent half my time in that store hollering at my boys, who had never been through the sampling process before. They thought it meant they could take a bite of whatever it was they were sampling, spit it out if they didn’t like it, and put it right back in the little dish.

I spent the other half fishing out whatever they had put back and throwing it away. 🙄

It’s a miracle they didn’t kick us out of that store.

The weekend went by too quickly and before we knew it, it was time to drive my sister to O’Hare airport and say goodbye.